Darpa’s Hologram Goggles Will Unleash Drone Hell

Darpa’s Hologram Goggles Will Unleash Drone Hell

The Pentagon’s mad-science arm wants robotic death-from-above, on demand. And the key to getting it done just might be holograms.

Let me explain. Right now, authorizing and targeting air strikes is a process that’s sometimes bureaucratic, and sometimes dangerous as hell. Bureaucratic as in the Stanley McChrystal phase of the Afghanistan war, when it took a gaggle of lawyers, intelligence analysts, air controllers, and commandersat multiple layers to put steel on target.

The result was fewer civilian casualties — but more U.S. troops, locked in firefights without air support. Dangerous as hell as in the Libya war, where NATO jets are accidentally offing Libyan rebels with such alarming regularity that the opposition forces are now painting their vehicles’ roofs pink, to distinguish them from Gadhafi’s rides.

Darpa believes there might be a single technological fix to both problems: Give a single guy on the ground a direct data link to the drone (or manned plane) circling above. That would eliminate the multilayered, bureaucratic approach, in which information is often passed through IM windows and static-ridden radio connections. That same lone “Joint Terminal Attack Controller,” or JTAC, might be low-profile enough to slip into a situation like Libya without causing too much of an international ruckus.

The program to make this all happen is called Persistent Close Air Support, or PCAS. And the goal is to give that controller the ability to “request and control near-instantaneous airborne fire support.”

Darpa and the Air Force Research Lab recently handed out big contracts to the usual suspects —Northrop Grumman and Raytheon — for the next phase of the PCAS project.